Undertow (5 page)

Still. Still. Se could always reverse it. It wasn’t sacrilege, not like missing part of a play, which was ephemeral and would only continue to exist as long as there was somebody to remember it, somebody who could tell it if the need arose.

The gate was shot; se hadn’t planned on going out until morning and the last thing se needed was a pod of snakewhites wandering in an unbarred door in the middle of the night. Se churruped, the swelling surface of se throat vibrating into the water. Beyond the gate, someone’s pale belly reflected the moving light. The other churruped back.

Caetei was a relative, one of Gourami’s endosibs. They were kin by water rather than gametes, but some said that was the strongest bond.

Caetei also worked for Rim.

Gourami slipped the gate and let se kick inside. —
I wouldn’t expect you to still be awake.

Caetei shot upward with a powerful flexion of legs. Se voice echoed oddly for a moment as se hauled self from full submersion to a comfortably damp perch on the ledge. —
I knew you would be
.

Gourami was a night-swimmer, a noon-sleeper by preference. As everybody in three rows knew, from the flicker of stories on se walls late into the night. Se heaved onto the ledge and stood to stretch, palms sticky flat against the arched roof of the house for balance. Bubble-shaped was not just sturdy and pleasant; it was safest in a storm.
—I was watching a story.
But of course, Caetei was already transfixed by the flicker. Se understood humen very well, better maybe than Gourami. Se hunched forward, half-crouched, and tilted side to side as if to improve perception of the huge humen figures imbedded in Gourami’s house-wall.

—
Will you restart?

—
I watched this one before,
Gourami lied. Too much exposure to humen, not to care about a drama. It’s just a story, se wanted to say. It is recorded. It will remember itself, like the stories the Other Ones took with them, when they left. But se didn’t, and was glad when se noticed the set of Caetei’s shoulders, which suggested something along the lines of: Oh. But I haven’t.

Se didn’t actually make the noises, though, so Gourami could pretend se had been looking away. Se did not want to watch the bad movie again.

Se did not even particularly want to watch the ending.

But se did, and when it flicked dark and the walls took up a mellow sun-colored glow to compensate for the lost illumination of the movie, se shifted se hips on the ledge. A few spans closer to Caetei was enough to press on se attention. Caetei blinked wide high-set eyes and shuddered, shaking out of the memorizy trance.
—You can have the code,
Gourami said.
—I won’t watch it again.

Caetei ducked in thanks and acknowledgment; Gourami made a sweeping, paddling gesture with se handfingers. Away from the mouth, not toward.
—Nothing to thank me for
.

Se sank down in the warm water and let it flow up between the ridges of se hips. Se legs stretched long, toefingers dangling over the edge of the ledge. Not a position to take in open water, when toefingers looked like food to many swimmers.

Comfortable, though.

—You were just coming to visit? Would you care for some soup?
There was plenty of broth, and Gourami could thicken it with seaweed for a meal. But Caetei’s posture did not suggest hunger, and se answered with the same paddling motion Gourami had used.

—I need to ask you to take an action.
Caetei hesitated, delicately. Gourami warbled quiet encouragement twice before se would continue.
—The thing the humen have green-band sibs drilling for on the shelf.

The thing that wasn’t petroleum. Which Gourami knew because Gourami had been liaison between the persons assigned to the drill and the humen assay team. And the assay team had tended to talk freely in front of persons, as some humen did. As if Gourami couldn’t lip-read perfectly well.

Gourami did not know what was
tanglestone,
or
omelite
either. Se did not understand humen excitement over
forking
and
incomplete forking
. But se understood that the humen were not drilling for oil. No matter what they told the persons at work, and the humen inspectors who came to the drill.

—It was a mistake to talk about it.
Because it was a
secret,
se had realized too late. And secrets were the opposite of stories. Se could lose se position from talking, se own comfortable existence, and se contribution to bandweal.
—I can’t tell you any more.

—I know a human who can help. If we bring it evidence stories. There might be other ways to protect the greatparents than begging Rim.

There might be. Gourami folded in on self, wrapping arms around flexed legs, and put se face between fleshy thighs. Se was moist and warm and comfortable, and shuddered anyway, as if attempting to shiver loose a parasite. Too much risk. Too much risk to the greatparents, to bandweal. To self.

The status quo was not so terrible. And se did not see it being better, for persons or for the greatparents of thousand-year memory, to start a revolution. Caetei never said so much, would not. But Gourami had no doubts as to what se endosib intended as an outcome.

—I won’t risk the greatparents,
se said, lurching upright and leaning forward. Se caught Caetei’s eye and held it, forcing a lock to be certain Caetei understood.
Will not. What the humen could do to us—

The whirring, melodious croak died at the back of se throat, se throatpouch still expanded. Se looked down, accidentally releasing Caetei.

Because they could. Gourami watched their stories, both the history and the inventions. The magnitude of the destruction that humen could wreak was inconceivable, if they grew wrathful.
—No.
Gourami said.
—No, I will not talk to your humen. I have greatparents to protect. I have egglings to think of. I cannot contribute to a war.
Se whirring had risen to operatic levels, echoing under the domed roof of se house until it boomed like a mating call.

Se fixed Caetei an acidic glance and modulated se voice, as Caetei ducked to avoid being gazelocked again. Gourami continued,
—And you should not either. You memorizy, I see you. If you think of being a greatparent, you must put others first.

Caetei knew that. Of course, and Caetei rose up on shaky legs, wincing apologetically.
—I will show myself out
.

—
I am not angry
. But Gourami was, upset at least, worried, and they both could smell it in the water, see it in the flush that surrounded paling mottles.
—Please come back when you want to talk about something else.

There. That was better.

—I will come back,
Caetei answered, and slipped into the ring pool.

Gourami waited until the gate thumped before turning back to se dinner. The broth had long gone cold.

3

OVER THE YEARS, ANDRÉ HAD COME TO ACCEPT THAT HIS
luck was often ridiculous, but he hadn’t expected a shot at filling the contract his first night out. He folded his forearms over the handlebars of his wet-dry scoot and let it bob, lights dark, on the moonlit water of the bay. The floor pushed his feet as it yawed. He hid behind the faring so his head wouldn’t silhouette on the horizon. The craft was low-profile; without the brightness of the sky or of Novo Haven’s lights behind him, André was nothing more than a blacker patch on the water.

About that luck, he thought, watching Lucienne Spivak and her guest come chattering down the floating dock. Ridiculous wasn’t the half of it. Epic, maybe. Operatic.
Farcical
. Because even by moonlight, with his lowlight adapt kicked up, he recognized the woman walking alongside Spivak, leaning into her so that their shoulders brushed, ducking down as they shook their heads over some joke funny enough that André could hear their laughter across the water.

“You know,” he murmured under his breath, “you couldn’t make this shit up.”

He wasn’t going to kill anybody in front of his girlfriend. Some things were beyond the call of duty, and it would be difficult to make it look like an accident if Spivak suddenly went down clutching her throat.
And
he wasn’t in a hurry. Impatient men often didn’t do well in André’s line of work.
Luck will only get you so far.
Even ridiculous luck—

With his lowlight, he could make out the hunched shape of a minifab at the top of the dock, a white shell path leading up to it. The residence itself was in a sheltered inlet that a high tide would turn into an island, not quite up the bayou—as Nouel had suggested—but on a channel and away from the open bay. A paramangrove swamp cut sight lines to the city, and the approach path of descending lighters lay directly over the house, which explained why this wasn’t more popular property. That, and the inconvenience of being an hour and a half by scoot or boat from the city.

He’d wait for Cricket to leave, and then he’d slip close enough to get an overview of the location. It would be better if he could catch Spivak away from home, but it didn’t hurt to know the turf. He’d have to be careful, though; Jean Kroc’s house was a homestead, no plans on record, and he had no idea what sort of security devices the conjure man might use. Anything from tiger pits to tracking lasers were possible, and it would be embarrassing to take a load of buckshot in the fundament.

André folded his arms and waited, listening to the women laugh. The breeze across the water was cool, carrying a taint of the heady sweetness from the parasitic flowers that swathed the paramangrove limbs. The scent carried over miles, and right now it told André that the wind was offshore. Which was also helpful to him; even if Kroc had a sniffer or a smart guard dog, it wouldn’t pick up André’s scent.

Yep. Luck was wonderful.

Pity he couldn’t talk any conjure on Greene’s World into helping him train it.

He wondered if he should have turned down this job. Closs would just have found somebody else, of course. Somebody who might botch it, or somebody who might be the kind of sadistic bastard who got his kinks out in his work.

He shifted on the hard seat of the scooter, pretending resignation as if he could convince himself. No matter how much of a hurry Closs was in, it wasn’t as if André had to kill anybody
tonight
.

Except it didn’t look like Cricket was leaving alone. She climbed into the passenger chair of the waiting flashboat and Spivak followed, settling in the pilot’s seat. If she was just running Cricket down to the ferry, about fifteen minutes, then—

—André might not need the research after all. More luck, that he hadn’t mentioned it to Cricket.

It could have put a strain on the relationship.

The engine of the flashboat was faster and louder than the caterpillar drive on the scoot. André waited until his prey was in motion before powering up. His scoot was dark gray, and the topcoat had a gloss-or-matte option that got a lot of work on night jobs. With the lowlight, he didn’t need the running lights.

He concentrated very hard, thinking of Spivak dropping Cricket off at the ferry landing just the other side of the paramangrove swamp and turning back for home, maybe a little careless and tired. He couldn’t take a blacked-out scoot into the city; if he didn’t get run down by a barge, he’d get pulled over by traffic enforcement—and Cricket might recognize him or the vehicle under conditions of more light. The ideal, of course, would be for her to drop off Cricket, turn around, head home, and run into engine trouble. Unfortunately, André didn’t think his untrained mojo was enough to pull off that set of coincidences, but he held the thought anyway, sharp and fine, visualizing in detail.

Such things happened, after all. More often than anyone admitted. His own childhood was a kind of anecdotal proof.

But Spivak guided the flashboat toward the lights of Novo Haven. The universe wasn’t listening. Or somebody else’s free will was getting in the way again. Just plain inconvenient.

She opened quite a gap as she headed inward—his craft wasn’t as speedy—but André wasn’t worried. It shouldn’t matter, as long as he could spot her running lights and the silhouette of her boat across open water.

Traffic was light at first, and there were no street—or channel—lights on the outskirts, other than the occasional door or dock lamp. But the traffic regs ensured that Spivak couldn’t just flash off and leave his slower vehicle behind. André flicked on his running lights to be legal, made up some of the distance, and slotted his scoot in behind a water taxi two vehicles back from Spivak and Cricket.

He didn’t even need to follow that closely. It was obvious pretty quickly that they were going to Cricket’s new flat. André hadn’t been there yet, but he had the address, and it was a neighborhood he knew.

He stuck close anyway, though, the tactile rubber of the scoot’s handlebars molding his palms, the engine softly vibrating his calves. He pulled a hooded sweater on one arm at a time—keeping his eye on traffic—and slipped on eye protection. Too dark for dark glass in the goggles, but they changed the line of his face a little. He skinned the beard off, which wouldn’t help if neither woman was running connex, but he knew Cricket at least usually kept her skins live. She hypertexted like a mad thing in conversation, her agile brain tending to shoot off in six unrelated directions at once.

The scoot was a quiet little craft, and André was glad of that as he ducked it out of the traffic stream one bridge shy of Cricket’s flat and diagonally across the channel. They unloaded quickly—a small favor from fate—and Cricket gave Spivak a one-armed hug as she climbed past her before turning away. André crushed a pang of conscience. He’d be there to console her.

It might even bring them closer together. Cricket had this unnerving tendency to flit just out of reach, as if she were covered in something slick and transparent. You could brush against her surface, but there was never any way to get a grip.

A minute later, Spivak finished fussing with her safety belts and pulled away from the landing. Headed in the opposite direction, not back across the side channel where André lay in wait. He twisted the throttle and sent the scoot forward, pulling into traffic smoothly to avoid attracting attention.

Now his heart thumped his breastbone. The crackle of tension spidered up his back to grab across his shoulder blades, and his stomach seemed to sway in his gut like a ballast bag of wet sand. His skin crawled taut across his thighs and groin; nausea chased bitterness up the back of his throat.

This was it.

The luck was running now.

It was ninety minutes before he got his shot. Spivak stayed in the city, visited a tavern André didn’t follow her into—it was on a decommissioned ferry, moored along the east side of Broadbrook, and there was no way off it that wasn’t immediately obvious—and returned to her flashboat after less that forty-five minutes. It might have been the meet, but his job wasn’t to stop the meet, or identify the other party. He didn’t do that sort of thing.

Afterward, she headed west, out of the city on Bayside. Not back the way they had come, but this was a shorter way and she could always cut across the shipping lanes for a nearly direct route back to Kroc’s house—a shortcut that would be ideal for André’s purposes. Not only did lighters kick up a hell of a splash when they touched down—a splash that could turn over a small craft—but big ships sometimes didn’t notice little boats, and accidents could happen.

André didn’t like to smile over his work; it seemed disrespectful. But it was hard to keep this one down: maybe prayer was good for something.

He should have stuck to his demand to be paid a bonus for a twenty-four-hour closure.

The only potential problem was the top speed of his scoot. If Spivak raced home, there was no way he could keep up. But if she was cutting the lanes, she’d want to proceed cautiously, with one eye on the sky. That would be better.

And it seemed to be her plan. André hung back almost a half-kilometer, trailing Spivak until they were well clear of Novo Haven. The submerged lights of the shipping lanes glowed beneath the surface of the bay, but there was no real danger of being caught against them; they were meant to be seen from above. Only one lighter splashed down during the transect, and that one well off to the south and gently enough that by the time the wake reached André, he cut across it diagonally and noticed only what the skip and lurch did in his already nervous belly. The night was calm, still warmer than he’d expected, and the breeze from landward had faded off, leaving a few late-traveling sailboats motoring along the placid surface with their white sails hanging slack. Spivak, charting a stately progress, seemed inclined to enjoy the night. André had no problem with letting her do it. It was a point of honor with him that his targets never even knew they were in danger. Necessity did not have to be cruel.

Around the middle of the landing field, he goosed it. The caterpillar drive wasn’t fast, but it was fast enough if Spivak didn’t hear him coming, and quiet enough that she shouldn’t. He set the autocruise, looped his hard memory, and—keeping one eye on the sky and the other on his quarry—began to assemble his weapon.

In most cases, André killed with a long-barreled sniping weapon, a combination rifle brand-named Locutor A.G. 351, for the year the design had been introduced. It adapted to either caseless standard ammunition—jacketed projectiles fired by a chemical accelerant—or crystalline slivers of hemorragine fired by compressed air, which dissolved in the victim’s blood, causing symptoms of a cerebral aneurysm, then broke down into innocuous organic compounds within the day.

That was what he would be using tonight. He preferred a bullet; it killed instantly if you did it right, whereas the hemorragine left the victim sometimes as long as 120 seconds to feel fear. And that was ugly and cruel.

The other issue with the damned things was that they didn’t fly far, and a fairly light cross-breeze could deflect them. He’d have to be within a hundred meters, and he wouldn’t get more than a couple of shots. People tended to notice when someone pointed a rifle at them and fired poisoned needles at the back of their heads.

He’d put one needle into her back, wait for her to go down, approach with caution, and download her hard memory for Closs—as instructed, just to be sure. Then he’d capsize her boat, lose the body someplace where it shouldn’t be recovered for at least a day (long enough for the hemorragine to break down, and for her hard memory to wipe), and pretend, in the morning, to be shocked when he heard the news.

The scoot purred forward. André extended the telescope rest and slid the weapon-mount onto the peg. He squinted through the sight, focusing down through the scope because only an idiot would connex this—though idiots did—and took a sighting.

Lucienne Spivak was sitting upright in the pilot’s chair, her braid whipping behind her, her shoulders square and facing him. Easy. The only way he could miss was a divine intervention.

He measured his breathing, matched it to the regular rise and fall of the swells, tugged his glove off with his teeth, slid his finger under the trigger guard. He waited for the moment, the moment when his breath would pause naturally just as the scoot topped one of the gentle waves.

The moment came. He squeezed the trigger. A jet of cool grease-scented air stroked his cheek.

There was no sound.

The sun wasn’t up yet when someone hammered on Cricket’s door frame. No doorbell, no chime of connex and the name of the importunate visitor, just the thumping of fist on paramangrove paneling.

“Oh, fuck,” Cricket murmured, twisting her legs into the cool air. She slept nude; she dragged the robe she kept on the bedpost over chilled skin and stumbled barefoot across a morphing rug that this morning was off-white and shaggily looped. Her toes curled as she stepped onto the decking, as if she could somehow protect the tender instep of her foot from the crawling chill. “Fuck, who is it?”

“Kroc,” came the voice from the other side of the door, which answered the question of why he was knocking. No connex to ring her chimes. His voice shivered, high and sharp, almost shrill. “Is Lucienne with you?”

“Shit,” Cricket said, and palmed the lock plate faster than she should have. “She left me around one hundred and one. She was going to get a drink and go home.”

“She didn’t make it,” Kroc said, unnecessarily, because sometimes it was better making a noise. He ducked under her arm into the flat, and she locked up behind him. “Check your messages. If she sent anything—”

It would have been to Cricket, because Jean was not connected. She tightened her robe and scrubbed her eyes on the sleeve. “One second.”

She dropped her connex at night, except for the flat security and a couple of emergency codes. If it had been really important, Lucienne would have spared the couple of extra keystrokes and sent to one of those.

But there were messages waiting. The one from André, which she hadn’t answered. One or two from connex acquaintances, people she knew from online groups. And one from Lucienne.